I don't see eye to eye with Lynton Crosby on many things. He’s an unashamed Right-winger and partly responsible for Boris Johnson’s last two election victories. His messages on hot-button issues like immigration have often sailed close to the wind. But on one thing he is absolutely right: you win elections by focusing relentlessly on the message and on the numbers.

That, not his reported remarks about “f***ing Muslims”, is the reason why this tough Australian is different. And it is why Lefties like me fear him now he has been appointed chief Tory election strategist for 2015.

Actually I find it hard not to warm to a bruiser like Crosby who’s prepared to tell plummy-voiced Tory fops what’s what. His style is famously blunt. As he barked at one young staffer on the Tories’ 2005 election campaign who had expressed doubts about their chances: “If that’s your attitude I suggest you piss off right now.”

In fact, Crosby’s blunt realism in 2005 was harsher than that. He reportedly told then-leader Michael Howard that the Tories needed to be realistic about the electoral mountain they had to climb. He demanded that they concentrate on 50 to 80 target seats rather than pursuing the broader, ill-focused campaign prepared by party co-chairman Maurice Saatchi.

Crosby’s campaign, in fact, was reminiscent in many ways of Labour’s in 1997, a battle I witnessed from the inside, in the party’s Millbank Tower headquarters. Labour’s strategy was based ruthlessly on 90 “key seats”, battlefields drummed into us so endlessly that at the 1996 staff Christmas pantomime the key seats team devised a song in which they chanted the whole list.

The focus on message in 1997 — Labour’s five pledges — was ruthless. Discipline, as during Crosby’s 2005 campaign, was strict. And Labour brought in a “daily brief” of top attack points, faxed to candidates first thing every morning: I was its editor. Crosby introduced the same in 2005 with a “campaign bulletin”.

That Tory campaign failed — but it wasn’t Crosby’s fault. As he’s fond of saying, “you don’t fatten a pig on market day”: he couldn’t perform a miracle when brought in just months before the election.

Today, Crosby’s focus on polling numbers echoes the triumph of the geeks in this month’s US election. Nate Silver, author of the fivethirtyeight blog, is the election’s most spectacular victor. Despite most pundits saying the race was too close to call, he crunched the polls and predicted that Obama had a more-than 90 per cent chance of winning. Old-fashioned, gut-feeling tactics don’t work any more. Obama understood that: his ground operation focused unswervingly on getting out his voters.

This is why it was perfectly sensible — if indelicately put — for Crosby to be sceptical about Johnson and the Muslim vote: the polling showed that few of them were going to vote Boris anyway. You don’t waste resources pursuing the other side’s core vote. You get out your own.

Of course that alone isn’t enough. The Tories lost in 2005 — and failed to gain a majority in 2010 — in part because they didn’t convince centrist floating voters. There’s a danger of a party ending up talking to itself when it doesn’t reach out. But the Tory core vote is fragmenting, as UKIP showed at last week’s Corby by-election. The Tories need some steel in 2015. And Lynton Crosby has plenty of that.